Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on a continent 3,000 miles wide? Why should we live Thomas Jefferson's and Alexander Hamilton's lives? Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live ours?
The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be Jefferson over again. It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself. If Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers, statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself.
I like to imagine how it would strike him. I am not troubled about what he would do. Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds, rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines. Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway! Jefferson in his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty, tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders!
He had not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility—that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without leaders.
Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of governing, as a means of getting the will of the people.
A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since Jefferson. This is the main fact about the modern man, that he is gloriously self-made. He is practising democracy, inventing his own life, making his own soul before our eyes.
If we have a poet in the White House, this is the main fact he is going to reckon with: He will not be seen taking sides with the Alexander Hamilton model or with the Thomas Jefferson model or with Karl Marx or Emerson. We will see him taking Karl Marx and Emerson and Hamilton and Jefferson and melting them down, glowing them and fusing them together into one man—the Crowd-Man—who shall be more aristocratic than Hamilton ever dreamed, and be filled with a genius for democracy that Jefferson never guessed. America to-day, on the face of the earth and in the hearts of men, is a new democracy, as new as Radium, Copernicus, the Wireless Telegraph, as new and just beginning to be noticed and guessed at as Jesus Christ!
Copernicus, Marconi, Wilbur Wright, and Christianity have turned men's hearts outward. Men live for the first time in a wide daily consciousness of one another.
Alexander Hamilton, had really a rather timid and polite idea of what an aristocrat was and Jefferson had merely sketched out a ground plan for a democrat. If Hamilton had been aristocratic in the modern sense, he would have devoted half his career to expressing a man like Jefferson; and if Jefferson had been more of a democrat, he would have had room in himself to tuck in several Alexander Hamiltons. Either one of them would have been a Crowd-Man.
By a Crowd-Man I do not mean a pull-and-haul man, a balance of equilibrium between these two men, I mean a fusion, a glowed together interpenetration of them both. They did not either of them believe in the people as much as a man made out of both of them would—a really wrought-through aristocrat, a really wrought-through democrat or Crowd-Man, or Hero or Saviour.